A sardonic wink anyone who just finished her latest book will understand; The Heart Goes Last is peopled by the kind of of fatally flawed, pitiable remnants of humanity we all secretly fear to see in ourselves.
In Jack Maggs, Carey reads Dickens in order to produce a late twentieth-century story of equally pitiable isolation, of trauma, wounds, secrets and confessions.
In the noble tradition of the Marquis de Lafayette, the Seven Samurai, Mighty Mouse and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Alan Keyes is leaving home to go to the aid of a pitiable band of outgunned, hopeless supplicants: the Illinois Republican Party.
These are but a few of the pitiable legacies of Reagonomics, and so much for making America great again.
All of which has meant a "pitiable line of filmmakers trailing out the doorway" of the HBO headquarters, Mr. Powers said.
Readers are treated to contextual anecdotes about the players in many of these dramas, ranging from those who developed the technologies (e.g., Michael Faraday for mercuric chloride), to those who studied the conditions (e.g., Jean-Martin Charcot for carbon disulfide neurotoxicity), to multiple pitiable descriptions of the victims of industrial progress (e.g., Clara, the benzol worker).
Each of these man-children offers his own special blend of innocence and id, balancing the pitiable traits of slackness and aggression with more appealing qualities of sweetness and honesty.
Instead, we have the pitiable sight of Labour making another of its small and puzzling sorties that neither damage the enemy nor inspire the friend.
The sandwich generation is getting stale.But, Bagehot submits, the most pitiable lot of all those most worthy of fellow passengers' sympathy on the plane, though they are unlikely to get it may be professional parents in their late 30s.
It was a corrective after a night of head-cramping excess: the pitiable hair of the shameful dog.
